


(but it ain't your time)

by chasingfirebytheseas



Category: Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Blood and Injury, Found Family, Gen, I spent way too much time on this, Major Character Undeath, Miles Morales Needs a Hug, Miles is Trying his Best, Miles is a good kid, Peter Parker Lives, The Author Regrets Nothing, and so will other Characters, but I am Happy to say The Story Never Ends, each chapter is its own Alternate Reality, emo over dead characters as usual, i had the compulsion and Spider-Noir arose from it, in which Author manipulates every possible semi-canon-compliant cranny there is, is author sad? yes., just a little ambiguous but not really, many alternate realities, originally a one-shot, the chapters do not indicate continuation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-11 05:01:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18423366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chasingfirebytheseas/pseuds/chasingfirebytheseas
Summary: “Can't you get up?”“Yeah,” says Spider-Man, in a long exhale that sounds like a sigh, red body a limp thing on the blocks of cement. “Yeah, I always get up.”(Let's take it from the beginning one last time.1. Miles Morales2. Peter Benjamin Parker3. Gwen Stacy)





	1. stupid deep

**Author's Note:**

> i was gonna be a Big Sad if i didn’t write something for this movie (bc its not like i have spent all my waking hours thinking about it), so here’s my addition to the Un-Unalive Peter pile.

“Can't you get up?” 

“Yeah,” says Spider-Man, in a long exhale that sounds like a sigh, red body a limp thing on the blocks of cement. “Yeah, I always get up.”

He says it like it’s been worn, a truth that’s been told too many times and one that would expire very soon if he doesn’t _move_. But he can’t, can he. Because not even Spider-Man can walk off an explosion at point-blank.

Spider-Man coughs, quips and tries to soften the situation by chuckling instead of coughing.

Miles has never seen a dead body.

Miles has volunteered in his mom’s clinic, once, or a couple of times, some on his own time, others for required civic projects. He’s never been in ER, since he’s too young to see shit like that, but his mom has come home more than once and tucked into his dad’s side and they would stay like that for a long, long time.

 _Bad night,_ his dad would say, and his face would be older on those nights. His mom would unfold herself and tug Miles into crushing hugs with murmured _I love you, mijo_ s like there was no tomorrow. As if there was no time left.

Miles has always gotten his tomorrow. He isn’t sure if the man collapsed like a dead body in rubble and dust will get his.    

The man--probably with fractures in places Miles doesn’t want to imagine--is saying a jumble of important-sounding stuff, things like _colliders_ and _blow it up_ and _promise me._ Something metal is being pressed into his clammy hand, but the kid can only really focus on that one blue eye piercing through broken lens, the blue fierce and uncompromising, _promise me,_ and suddenly Miles knows that if he’s going to run, he’s not going to run alone.

“Promise me you’ll do this,” Spider-Man is saying, hushed and urgent. To save the city or the universe, Miles isn’t sure, but he doesn’t care for it. He knows what he needs to save right now, and it isn’t Brooklyn.

“I promise,” says Miles, with an offhand certainty that doesn’t have an inch of finality in it, apparently off enough to cause concern, because Spider-Man’s single blue eye widens in semi-horrified realization.

“No, _no,_ whatever you’re thinking--don’t.” The man hacks out something wet and sick, head lolling backwards. He breathes, but it sounds out of him like rattling bones. His voice cracks when he speaks again, and the desperation spills through. “You have to go. _Now.”_

The faint tingling at Mile’s neck flares up then, an unnamed sense calling his attention to the scuffling footsteps and muddied voices some distance away, approaching ever closer with every second they aren’t using to actively escape. Miles tries not to think about what would happen if King Pin's men moved faster than they did.

“I’m not gonna leave you here,” he says, nearly hisses it in frustration when his free, sweaty hand slips on whatever Spider-Man’s suit is made of. His breath comes up short when he hears an distant echo that sounds a lot like King Pin, and tries to get the man to sit up again, to _move, goddammit._ Miles still has that dumb metal thing--a USB, he belatedly realizes--and he has half the mind to hurl it so he’s got both hands, but Spider-Man has enough strength in him to intercept Miles before he can.

His grip on the boy’s wrist is easily breakable, laughable even--but Miles feels his strain, feels the tremors traveling from the man’s body to his own through that touch, that cold and colder touch. The blue eye wanders, scraping for the other’s eyes, before locking with brown.

“Kid," the hero murmurs, in this quiet whisper that doesn’t at all soften the words that are spoken as if they were simple truth, "I’m not gonna last.”

There’s resignation in his voice, in his gaze, in the way his chest is slowing and Miles _hates_ it.

No one should end like this, blown up to near oblivion and left alive just long enough for some crime boss to mete out more misery.  

No one should end up like this, alone in someplace where the sun can’t even reach. Alone.

No one should die alone.

“Not like this, you won’t.” Miles says, sharp, and before he lets himself think he’s moving, shoving the USB into his pants and lifting rubble off the man almost too easily. He’s got strength, is the faraway observation. The small heat of hope lights in him. Superhuman strength, maybe?

“Hey-”

“This is gonna hurt,” warns Miles, just before he’s hauling the man up and across his back, over his shoulders. Muffled groans spill out from both of them--Miles because he’s now got a fully grown man to cope with; Spider-Man no doubt because he’s actively dying and Miles hopes to god he didn’t just die from that, if the sudden limpness is of any indication. The boy wants to ask if he’s okay, if he’s dead yet, but then his sense is going bonkers on him-

Footsteps. Louder. Flashlights flicker across the chipped off walls near them.

“I heard something over here,” one voice calls, alarmingly close and coherent, and his sense screams _danger_ and Miles stops thinking then and just scrambles backward, mind singular in its goal to get as far away as possible.

Letting the tingling guide him, he clambers up the debris as quietly as he can with deadweight on his back. He makes noise, but it’s lost in all the yelling the bad people were doing. There are more footsteps joining the scene, and new voices. Miles watches the lights swivel this way and that, heart in his throat.  

“He ain’t here!” Shuffling movement, rubble being angrily tossed aside. “Fucking _cockroach_.”

Grateful for the black cloud of soot and smoke that obscured just about everyone’s view, Miles crouches behind malformed chunks of steel and waits. Waits for the lights to pass, then waits some more. He moves again only when the frustrated and mildly panicked voice of King Pin's goons recede out of earshot. When the prickle at his nape lessens and death seems less imminent, Miles starts to hop obstacles, hastening across the desolate landscape and, despite his best efforts, bumping into almost every piece of rubble.

Arms, long limp arms, flop uselessly against his sides with every graceless movement. Cold, cold, cold. Is that bare skin or Spider-Man's suit? It feels like a dead body on his back.

 _Please, no,_ he thinks, begs. 

“Hey,” Miles whispers, voice harsh with dust. He makes a halting stop under a standing piece of mauled infrastructure that seems less unstable than the others. Who knows, maybe they will die here, the two of them, but he can’t afford that, so. He tries again. “Hey, Spider--Mr. Spider-Man.” No reply. He’s breathing too hard--he can’t tell if Spider-Man’s chest isn’t moving when his is moving too much.

They’re so close.

Miles can see an exit, or entrance or whatever, the one Kingpin must’ve used to get here because the boy hears the man, catching his low voice even this far into the devastated landscape.

“Where. Is. He.” A threat. Everything that comes out of King Pin's mouth seems to be a threat. There’s nothing for a while, a silence that doesn’t make sense, but there’s a scream, a _boom_ that shakes the ground.

Miles closes his eyes, swallows past the gravel in his throat. Tries not to imagine if that had been Spider-Man at King Pin's mercy. Only there would be no mercy involved.

Miles starts to ramble, more for his own sake than for the man draped lifelessly over him, because he spirals like a shot in the dark and his eyes are burning holes in his mettle. “Spider-Man. Hey, is it okay if I call you Spidey? Maybe Mr. Spidey? I don’t know if you can hear me, but we’re almost there. I see an exit. So hold on, okay, I’m gonna get you out of here even if it takes everything I have and everything’s _fine_ -”

“Sssshhh, kid’o,” interrupts the hoarse, hollow hiss from his apparently undead hitchhiker, “I’ve got a funeral goin' in my brain.”

 

* * *

 

The kid falls to his knees _._ Like, keels over. At first Peter thinks it’s because he’s too heavy and the kid is too weak, but then the small, small body beneath him is shaking, the stuttering movements sending little shocks through the man’s chest. Ow. Ow. Lots of pain to unpack there. _Is he crying?_

“Are you cryin’?” Peter slurs out, perfectly astute.

“No,” the kid says, and hiccups. Beyond the haze of misfiring nerves, Peter feels something wet on his arm, in the ripped areas of his suit. “I’m not. I’m okay. Just. Relieved you aren’t dead.” His voice breaks then, and _god_ he’s so young. Peter can’t see the kid’s face from where he is, but he remembers those brown eyes. They’d shone so bright. He remembers thinking, before the parallel realities, before his body split, when he was still perched on that railing and looking back at the kid who had starstruck eyes, _this is it._

Peter hadn’t been surprised exactly, when he’d watched that too young face line itself with misguided determination. The decision to save him was dumb, stupid, brave. Stupid.

I would be dead, Peter idly realizes.

“Me too, kid'o.” It’s the best thing he can say then, when feelings painful and bitter and sad scrape into Peter’s chest. Everything hurts. The kid gives a hiccup of a laugh at that. They are doing this all in strained whispers, a painful work of labor for Peter. The walls echo far too well for them to not. They’re still in enemy territory. Somewhere not far, King Pin and his men are searching for him, them.

They could die here tonight.

In one reality, they already have. In another, Peter dies about ten minutes ago, alone.

In this one, Peter asks for the kid’s name and he says, _nuh-uh, you first._

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They make it out.  
> Writing an Undeath fic myself makes it more believable.  
> I don't blame Miles for not making that decision and I'm sorry he even had to.  
> (I hope you notice things in your life. Time is neutral, but you aren't.)


	2. fire sun burn light/right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (you're such a bleedin heart, aren'tcha)
> 
>  
> 
> In one reality, Miles saves him. In another, well. That's up for grabs, isn't it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uh so I was hella inspired by [HopelesslyLost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HopelesslyLost/pseuds/HopelesslyLost)'s writing on Spider-Noir and I churned this outta me bc it would be a dear shame not to.
> 
> Also! Note: I'm assuming that when the collider exploded and spat out our spiders, Noir was hurled into the current timeline (unlike Gwen). Current timeline being Miles is having a crisis conversation with Peter, and in the next couple of minutes Peter ~~dies~~.
> 
> You can read Noir as a dead-ass old man or a 20-something/younger. I wrote him with the latter in mind, though. 
> 
> EDIT: THANK YOU HOPELESSLYLOST foR LOWKEY BEIN MY BETA READER FOR THIS CHAPTER, bless you and bliss me.

Noir is quick on his feet. He always knows where the exit is, identifies them upon entry and if there isn’t one he makes one. It’s that simple, never easy--nothing in his life is.

He really doesn’t expect one to open right underneath him.

Except it--what is it, it looks like hell or some lidless peeper--isn’t an exit, it’s an black hole that swallows him whole and he’s moving, traversing planes of existences that aren’t his, _he sees a man who looks like him who has the same symbol on his chest who looks dead_.

He’s plummeting or soaring, Peter can’t tell, and everything seems endless and absolutely irrevocable _like he can’t go back_ _because there’s a force at his back_ and he can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel until he does, this inevitable collision rushing towards him like the ground during a freefall. Peter feels it in his bones, his sense a grave-cold tremor that tells him to brace himself, they are about to make contact, impact-

Peter’s been dropped from sky-high buildings and collapsing towers, even from hurtling airliners and unforgiving monsters, but even that doesn’t begin to compare to being ripped through space and time and air and he’s _breathing again,_ oxygen searing his lungs like wildfire. He realizes he’s falling now, plummeting actually, and his brain isn’t unlike scrambled eggs in that bruising interlude but his body remembers how to fall.

He ends up plastered against a wall, anyway.

When Peter finally peels himself off, and his head stops swimming and his brain stops being all wet, he opens his eyes and still thinks he might as well be going insane.

The light, lord, the _lights._

Peter thinks maybe the ol’ Joe had slipped giggle juice in his egg cream or something, because he’s doing double takes and usually he gets what’s happening by now but he  _doesn’t._

_Is that the sky?_

Blind, he must be going blind. His sky doesn't look like that, it's grey and black on some days with blades of light that cut through it. Lightening. Flashes of it.

This sky _is_ light. 

Peter breathes, cuts out of existence then back--a world unbecoming, a connection suddenly undone. He dies for a moment, comes back. There’s something forced in between, a connection forged across space not time, flickers of something all too familiar; _a man, a boy, they are going to die_.

His sense does not give him prophecies, only premonitions. His powers do not include falling through black holes and ripping through time and space and _not existing for one hellish second_ but all his senses are awake and deafening, not screaming but goddamn thundering.  

He’d felt it, before. An acute awareness that this was meant to be, and he was meant to be somewhere else by now.

So his body moves faster than his brain and there’s a force at his back--raw raw raw fear, _the man looks dead but the boy isn’t,_ not yet and it’s never really a fear of death, _don’t let him be too late_.

There’s no need for digging, because even for all the gumshoe in him he knows very well that there’s a time for thinking and a time for doing. He follows the connection, feeling it physically angle his feet and nudge him below, down down down, his attention a single-minded devotion because all those bizarrely moving train-like enigmas don’t matter at all, he just needs them to _move_ so he can get through.

He does. He emerges in a place missing light, missing sun and the first thought that comes to mind is _he could work with this._

His suit, everything about him actually, coincides with the space, the charred and decaying and desolate state of it. Black smog of soot and smoke have filled the steel cavity, the crumpled remains of some important-lookin gizmo scattered down below, mounds on top mounds of mutilated steel beams and expensive infrastructure. Explosion, he thinks. Peter has the faintest impression this is a scientist’s den, or a damned mook’s, because something went very wrong and he feels like it oughta be common sense to know illegal inter-dimensional experiments would go sideways real quick.

A pulse runs through him and he casts his eyes wayward, seeing two figures in a small halo of light far down below. Two live figures. Not dead, not yet. Peter recognizes the...multiple shades of light that the man who looks like him wears. He imagines the symbol they share. He has to get down there.

The metal walls had survived the explosion, and whatever other atrocities committed here. Peter begins to scale swiftly across the undamaged panels, his stealth as natural as the wind surrounding him. He avoids still spitting circuits, flashing tidbits that could give him away. It doesn’t take long for his keen ear to pick up echoes, faint hums of voices that trigger danger and death and despair. Fear picks itself back up inside him, an old old fear that even now this late in the game Peter hasn’t learned to tame. He curls, launches himself silently into the air, swinging. Maybe because it’s just that, the way he can rely on it to keep him on his toes, the way it lights something dark in him that he uses to feed into fire.

He keeps his head, keeps his eyes on the prize.

Picking through rubble is like picking through trash, and he’s had plenty experience at both. Some ways in, Peter hears the low rumbling voice of who he supposes is the Top Dog, based on the way he says “Find him. Now,” and the scurrying footsteps of men who hurry to obey. This becomes immediately secondary when he hears another voice, a cracked, hoarse and blood-ridden one rasp out, “Promise me you’ll do this.”

Noir makes it to just a few meters away when he hears a younger voice, a scared, _young_ and shaky one whisper, “I promise,” and for a moment Peter thinks the kid is swearing his soul away (because isn't that exactly what he had done, ages ago, when he'd first worn his suit, sworn by his symbol).

Several things happen, then, when he takes a step forward.

Peter is taken by a feeling he has never known before. A feeling of absolute familiarity, of complete and utter surety. It coats him, a sensation that doesn’t seek to overwhelm him but instead sinks into his skin, touches his soul in some effortless maneuver of grace and warmth, like a match struck. 

Peter looks at them, the ones in that pale halo of light, and they look back at him. Eyes wide, ever wider. The kid has a richness in his, a kind of bright newness, a spark. The man has a sharpness in his, an aged understanding, not ruthless but relentless _._

They are alive.

The kid doesn’t move but Noir does, and the other man, the Spider-Man of this city, watches him with one light-filled eye  _like the sky_  that’s very quickly misting over in a haze. Concussion, Peter thinks, is the least of his injuries. His head is already turning gears, digging in places he doesn’t want it to, like this connection so readily forged but already so rapidly fraying.

“Not yet,” he hisses, lurching forward to half-pat, half-slap the light-covered Spider-Man’s face, refusing to allow that sudden tinge of desperation leak into the trust, the faith he had just started to feel again.

The sky-eyed man looks back up to him, the aged understanding there and so present when he says, whispers it, “Save the kid.”

It makes him so angry. He had the kid promise. He had that symbol on his chest.

“You’re bumping gums, grifter,” and Noir doesn’t spit it, but there’s fear in him, fear that feeds into the fire called desperation that he so cleverly masks with anger.

The man chuckles at that. Coughs. Closes his eye.

“They’re coming,” the kid says, so quiet and still, staring at Noir then at the one he made a promise to, and his rich eyes are falling apart but he says it anyway, “We gotta go. Now _."_ And something just may be breaking in Peter’s chest, as it has so many times before. His brain is working, methodical when it renews his mistakes, his failures, his losses, _too late too late too late._

Then the kid is pushing past him, tossing off rubble from the light-covered Spider-Man and pulling his split body upright from all the soot and dirt and rocks like he doesn’t _belong_ there and. There's tears on his cheeks.

“C’mon, c’mon,” he’s muttering, small hiccups bleeding into his movements. Peter hears the footsteps, the approaching voices quickly morphing into yells and in them some sick, victorious trill. Lights are thrown against the black walls, seeping through clear and severe. They know, they are coming.

He can see the exit. It isn’t a black hole, this time.

 _This is it,_ thinks Peter, just as he says, breathes it out like another promise he can’t afford to make but Uncle Benjamin had always told him to move mountains.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Rain. He smells rain. Cool wind on his face, air that isn't smoke brushing into his corrupted lungs.

He's not familiar with this kind of floating sensation, this un-tethered but somehow grounded kind, but he faintly recognizes the body he's against, the hum of  _trust me_  like a steady heartbeat, a safety and surety Peter had not expected.

When Peter slits opens his eyes, he's nearly blindsided by the light, the sun. In the midst of it all, he sees the man in black, the one who he had seen _in a parallel reality, in a world that had forgotten what it meant to give._

He hears distant murmurings, something like  _he's_ _waking up_ a faraway whisper from a voice from a boy he had desperately wanted to protect. 

_Trust me._

Peter closes his eyes, thinking his world may not be over yet.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yikes™ I think this is multi-chaptered now but honestly no fucking regrets.
> 
> [References for 1930s slang here](http://stardustghoul.tumblr.com/post/64240942648/have-some-1930s-slang).


	3. show me yesterday, for i can't find today

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (you’ve got your skeleton in my closet, i’ve built a house from your bones)
> 
>  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Implied/referenced suicidal thinking, depression, emotional trauma and trauma in general.
> 
>  
> 
> Gwen is the only one out of the rest of 'em to _not_ be blasted into the current timeline and instead into the very recent past, which if you think about it for long enough is kinda cruel because. She could have Been There. And if you think about it hard enough, being thrown into last week also means a week before the Collider, and Peter is always gonna be thrust into the Collider, so the Collider is always gonna explode and spit out Spiders, and so Gwen is always gonna be thrown into last week, and on it goes. Am I rationalizing it wrong? I hope I am, bc that's a horrible fucking loop to stick Gwen "Is-Not-Over-Peter Parker-and-Will-Probably-Never-Be" Stacy.

Gwen thinks, slowly and very very carefully, that maybe Miles isn’t why she’s here.

Maybe _he_ is.

 

_he dissolves, and it’s the face that materializes first from the scales, a monster made and a monster undone because isn’t it still reversible_

_before he even hits the ground she knows this is inevitable_

  


 

Gwen follows Miles into the underground, and she is so glad she did because he's caught in the crossfire, another innocent left out in the fray, _but what use is she if she can't fucking reach him_ , but the Spider- _Man_ of this universe saves him with movement so liquid Gwen has to stop and breathe, because she’s been a hero for a while now and it has never taken her breath away quite like this.

Is this how folks feel when she saves them? Her symbol feels like a star, the sky, the sun. It sears her.

 _Hero,_ she thinks, as her eyes follow them down to that small platform. Miles all but backs away from him, Spider-Man. Something’s happening.

“ _I thought I was the only one_ ,” breathes the man behind the mask, an echo that reaches her in a gentle wave of vibration and yet it spears its way into Gwen’s chest.

He sounds a little starstruck and a lot like Peter, _a echo that hurts like a ghost_. He sounds like her broken heart.

 

 

 

 

 

It hadn’t taken her sense to tell her who Miles was.

The sweat, the sticking, the sudden and not-so-strange height difference. Yeah, the sticking had been a dead giveaway. _A Puberty Thing_ , _Miles_?

He had been glued to a wall, to _pigeons_ , the last time she had checked.

 

 

 

 

 

Her sense screams at her to plaster herself against the ceiling.

Fisk's voice hollows out _it’s a hell of a freaking lightshow, you’re gonna love this_ and there’s a sinking surety that she will not, none of them will. The whole dome quakes, a probe and powerful rays exploding into color, and it’s forcing open something that was never meant to open, not like this. The colors are blood, spilling from a raw wound, an inexorable fissure ripping through worlds and across universes.

She’s being pulled toward it.

This world does not want her here, _an anomaly, an misplaced body,_ air is being forced out of her, a force not unlike gravity tearing at her frame, her entire existence a lifeline gone haywire.

Gwen sees Miles first, when she forces her eyes open to gain some ground, sees how he’s barely hanging on like she is. _Where is Peter._

He is already in flight--and it strikes her again, _Peter is Spider-Man_ \--a blur of red swinging upward on his way to set things right when a claw cages his body, a choking certainty, and he’s no longer reaching but falling, down down down-

She doesn’t think when she launches forward, letting her insides sear if it means riding the gravitational pull, because she may be decaying but she’s not gonna let this happen again, not before _her_.

Green Goblin had thrown its whole weight like an idiot, its wings are beating furiously but it-- _Peter_ \--are sailing straight into the colors, into the blood, plunging forward with force and Gwen knows futility, knows it far too well and she already _knows_

Peter is thrust into the beams, not blood now but fire. His body is being consumed, taken and used as a binding factor, a thread made to snap, but connection rips across space and time, _inevitable._

Gwen splits _,_

 

 

_sees herself plummet across the realities until she reaches this one, blasts into time and land in last week, before this before this an endless repetition punishment_

 

 

 

She is falling, now. Her sense tells her to wake up in the now.

 _Miles_ , she thinks, weakly. He’s still hanging there, small body wrapped around the thin steel poles that won’t hold soon.

There’s a kind silence, a momentary flat-line in the energy, as if it is done gathering.

Gwen hurtles towards Miles, landing just in front him and before he can even reel or react, she’s curling around him, putting as much of her body in the way before----

 

_explosion. whole worlds vaporized and restored._

 

It takes her breath away.

  
  
  


 

 

 

 

 

 

Consciousness returns to her in flakes, that and through the incessant shaking of her ribs.

“Get up,” is the whispered hiss, still faraway, “c’mon, Spidey, _please_.”

The nickname stirs her, much like the voice that says it, but apparently not fast enough because there’s a stutter of an half-expletive and half-apology before the hands are gone, taking the shaking and the warmth with it.

Her head, her teetering and reeling head, is almost grateful for it. The rest of her is not.

Gwen vaguely registers the voice and the fast fading footsteps as Miles, and if he’s moving like that, shaken and downright harried, he’s fine and she’s done good and she’s probably going to die now. People only move like that when they're running from something, something like a chimera fresh out of lab, a house (or city) on fire, or something really simple like a gun and a finger on the trigger.

But Gwen has never been a body on the ground for too long, so she steels herself for anything and opens her eyes.

There is nothing, no one, expect for the blackness of smog and the inconsistencies of her thoughts.

It makes sense. Her sense hadn’t alerted her, hadn’t done anything at all, but her brain had taken the unnecessary leap. (Her nerves are shot. There’s a yawning pain in her back, a bone-weary exhaustion in her soul that hadn’t been there before.

 _that’s a lie. Lately she’s made a home out of bones, freshly broken_ )

She has to find Miles. She has to find Peter (or whatever remains of him _, dissolving, disintegrated, dead_ ).

She is relatively intact, mind aside, so she pulls herself, numb legs and wobbly heart and all, from the ground. Rubble, chips of rock and glass break from her. Gwen moves forward. If she doesn’t, she knows with an odd certainty that she will fade off somewhere.

It doesn’t take her long. To find them. Takes her six steps, actually.

It hadn’t occurred to her that Miles hadn’t been running _from_ something, but _to_ someone.

She finds Miles, and by extension, Peter.

Peter, who lifts his head up the moment she catches sight of him, has a blue-eyed gaze that cuts her open.

Softly, her sense hums and hums and hums. Softly, like a well-used coat or one of her fur ones, a feeling as gentle as her father’s goodnight kisses descending upon her. Softly, as if Gwen deserved it, this truth.

A Peter Parker who’d survived.

A Peter who’d hit the ground, who’d got freaking blasted for no one’s sake, who’d is nevertheless _alive_ and _like her._

“I’m sorry for leaving you,” bursts out Miles, relieved and nervous and so, so sorry, and Gwen has to physically drag her eyes to him, “I saw him and he looked so messed up, I just couldn't-”

“It's okay,” interrupts Gwen, shakily but not unkindly, voice holding in a way the rest of her isn’t. She sees how the guilt works through him, like it has through her. “I would have done the same.”

Spider-Man coughs, then, a wheezing wet hiss of a sound, and that guilt spills through her again--ruthless and relentless. 

She's been counting the days. Two hundred forty seven. Eight months. It feels like yesterday. 

The pain in her back is numb, nothing to the muted thing she has kept in her chest, a sick and searching thing that has Gwen all but falling to her knees beside his red body.  

She says it,  _Peter_ , speaks his name into existence because he does exist, in this time.

It feels as if she has not spoken in years. She is not ready for the way he looks at her.

There is recognition there, even in that misty-eyed confusion, in the impossible awareness in that same, exact same, blue hue.  

“Gwen,” is the small, crushed sound of realization, her name nothing of hers when he says it like _that, a gasp riding by a blood-ridden coffin,_ like he _knows_.

He sounds a little starstruck, a little destroyed. “You are Gwen Stacy. _"_

A piece of her _her heart_ breaks and stills in that moment, because it has never occurred to her that maybe Peter had lost someone like her, in this world where he isn’t gone yet.

“I am.” Her voice still doesn’t break, but she prays for God then and gets an itch behind her mask for it.

She wouldn’t take it off. Can’t. It’ll break him more than it has already, if that sick and searching thing in his eye is any clue. Faintly, in the ridges of her consciousness, there is an insistent urge to run, to do something that’s not kneeling next to another body of another Peter Parker like he’s just another skeleton to hang in her closet.

“Gwen,” says a different voice, one that doesn’t share any quality of the dead, " _hey."_

A hand on her shoulder, shaking. Gwen looks up at Miles, at his brown eyes and brown skin and the line of his lips that folds easily into smiles and sunshine. He looks as if he’s been burned, and yeah there’s a literal description in that, but his eyes are wet anyway.

“We have to,” Miles takes a steadying breath, the shudder running through his arm into her shoulder, “we have to move him. Before they come.” His head jerks at the flashlights on the black ceilings. “You can hear them, too, can’t you.”  

He’s shaky and scared and sure all at once, and it startles Gwen a little. He just got his powers; she can see still the faint swelling on his right hand. He must be terrified. He is. He’s staring at her, shaking, because Spider-Man is dying in front of him, in front of them both. There’s an obvious determination in his thinned lips, something a bit unshakable in the way he’s trying to reach her.  

He wants to save him too, is an idle but slightly overwhelming thought.  

 _Not alone_ , her sense hums out.

It doesn't snap her out of it, nothing ever really does, but some piece of her settles back, as if it had understood that it’s safe to breathe again. So Gwen breathes, finding ground amidst the rubble.

“I can carry both of you,” she says, turning back to Peter, trying to see the places where she can hold him without making anything worse, “but it won’t be easy and it might hurt, so.” Gwen watches Peter breathe for a small second (a small miracle), her heart tightening into something final. She looks towards Miles, who is squatting right across from her, his eyes wet but burning.

“You think you can hang on for a while longer?” She asks, to Miles, to Peter, to the lost person inside of her, and she already knows. 

“Lead the way, _Gwanda_ ,” says Miles, a crack on his face, and she feels her lips curl.

 

* * *

 

They are too young for this, Peter thinks. Too young for dying.

There's a kid who looks like he's in middle school who is like him who he had promised, then another kid who looks like she couldn't be much older who is like him who he doesn't know but somehow does, in a vague, quiet and an infinitely more unsettling way that has nothing to do with their powers.

Peter wouldn't know for sure, since she doesn't take off her mask and she doesn't try to take off his.

 _But she speaks in the voice of his dead best friend,_ _and_ his heart suddenly feels a lot more broken then his chest.

He stops breathing then, tries not to, and ends up coughing. They look at him like he's dying and, well. Peter can't exactly deny it when he can feel his fractures every time he tries to breathe. She falls to her knees there, between the gaps in his broken body. She knows him, _she says his name like it's precious, like it's gone_. He must be in a grave in her universe.

 _I’m sorry_ , he wants to say. Just to ease that pain there, in them both. The other kid beats him to it. Peter closes his eyes in distant relief. He sees an ending that looks like a beginning. 

There's a light hand on his chest, feather-like, as if to catch his faint, trembling breath.  _Thank you,_  he thinks he says, breathless.

Then Peter is being lifted, his bones are shifting, and he forgets the world. He comes back to the sun. 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _i did the shoulder touch did u catch it_

**Author's Note:**

> They make it out.


End file.
